


in the sun there's room for you

by brinnanza



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Missing Scene, RQG 107: Questions and Answers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:14:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25656481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brinnanza/pseuds/brinnanza
Summary: In the wake of Barrett's unceremonious arrival to the factory in Damascus, Sasha considers.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 29





	in the sun there's room for you

**Author's Note:**

> ::dabs:: here's this; title's from the mechs' skin and bone

Scraps of moonlight peek through the cloud cover and glint off the blade of the dagger Sasha tosses idly from hand to hand. She’s watching the road while Grizzop patrols a wide circle around the factory and its warehouses. She appreciates Grizzop’s company, his frank way of speaking and no-nonsense attitude, but solitude has long been Sasha’s preference, even before she knew what it meant to have friends. It’s nice, sometimes, be able to let her thoughts spill across her face without being expected to explain them.

Even all the way out here, up the side of a mountain and miles away from town, it’s louder than she might have expected. Other London was never really quiet, not with the constant creak and whine of metal, footsteps not quite light enough. Compared to here though, it’s practically silent. Sasha wonders whether she’d even be able to hear the creak of a cart wheel over the call of nightbirds, the chirp of insects, the wind through the trees.

She doesn’t miss it, Other London. Not really. It’s just… familiar, like the way you miss the old set of lockpicks when you get new ones. You replace them for a reason, because they’re broken or bent or otherwise useless, but your hands remember them, and it takes a bit for the new ones to fit. She has already seen more of the world than she’d ever dared to imagine growing up underground, and this is… it’s better. She’d known, or thought she did, how her life was going to go, had imagined slipping each new set of shackles, had imagined _surviving_ , but only barely.

And now, she knows she would be perfectly happy to never set foot there again, even now with Barrett on his way to a long, boring imprisonment. She knows it, knows the ins and outs, how to slip past the more brutal guards, where the rats and eels are best, but there is so much world beyond the Other London streets.

Sasha glances up at the sky, gauges the cloud cover shifting over star-studded velvet. There’s no sky visible in Other London, no clouds or moon, and the sky seems endless above her now, empty but for those pinpricks of light. It had terrified her once, still sort of does if she’s being honest. There’s just so _much_ of it, a vast and yawning expanse that could swallow her up entirely. 

She inhales the cool night air, presses herself more firmly into the crevice where she has concealed herself. The pressure of the rock through her jacket, no longer aching with unhealed scars, is grounding. She is a creature of the shadows and lives well among them, a knife held easy in her grip.

It’s almost funny, how small her world used to be. A kept bird only knows its cage, has no conception of a world beyond its walls. It thinks itself the center of all things, that its trials and tribulations are a singular tragedy and every slight intentional, never knowing that there is far more apathy than genuine malice. There are only the bars and its jailers, the only contact it has ever had.

It’s just a bird. 

Shadows stretch long across the road below, dark in the way only the small hours of the morning can be. Birds call out, and somewhere nearby, Grizzop’s footfalls crunch through dirt. Sasha knows, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that a cry for help will be met with swift aid. She has people at her side, people she trusts enough to turn her back to without fearing a knife. 

She’s… alive. 

She doesn’t care what happens to Barrett, not anymore, not really. The shadows he cast over her have been drowned out in gold, in green, in bright pink, illuminating every dark corner of her. She won’t think about him anymore - not because she doesn’t want to but because she doesn’t have to. He will exist, and it won’t matter.

What matters to Sasha now is this: the weight of a blade in her hand, the distant crunch of footprints, the sun just beginning to peek out pink and gold over the horizon. 

The sun doesn’t rise in Other London. Sasha wears shadows like a cloak, revels in the dark, but there are some things worth stepping into the light for.


End file.
